Race for Assembly Speaker Is a Fight Until the End

As fast as Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan speaks — and there are few in public life who can, like her, reel off complete, properly punctuated sentences with dependent clauses at 60 miles per hour — she could not keep up with the call-waiting beep on her phone on Thursday afternoon.

Ms. Nolan, a Democrat from Queens, had announced earlier in the week that she was a candidate for speaker of the Assembly, to replace Sheldon Silver.

But the field was changing and shrinking by the hour.

“I’ve heard that other people are dropping out, but I’m not,” she said. “If people say they have locked it up, I say, ‘No.’ We said we were going to have an open process, and have presentations in conference.”

The contest to succeed Mr. Silver has narrowed to three: Joseph D. Morelle from upstate; Carl E. Heastie from the Bronx; and Ms. Nolan. Behind the scenes, county party leaders were herding votes and hedging bets, and Ms. Nolan said she wondered what had happened to the thunderbolt of reform that was supposed to guide the Assembly after Mr. Silver fell from grace.

She recalled how past speakers were selected. “Do you think Saul Weprin or Mel Miller or any of those guys got up and said why they wanted to be speaker? They were just ‘made.’ ”

Ms. Nolan walked into the New York State Assembly for the first time 30 years ago, age 26, from a blue-collar family in Ridgewood, Queens. Geraldine Ferraro of Queens had been the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in the 1984 elections, and Ms. Nolan said she rode in on a Ferraro tidal wave. “There were older women in Ridgewood who said, ‘How wonderful, your husband lets you work,’ ” Ms. Nolan said.

At the time, Ms. Nolan recalled, the only assignments in Albany for women, Democrat or Republican, Senate or Assembly, were on legislative committees overseeing mental health and women and families. No women were on the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee, which decides taxes and budgets.

She represented the Assembly on a committee that oversaw the capital budget for the mass transit system, was on the Labor Committee, Ways and Means, and is now the chairwoman of the Education Committee. “You learned to get the commas and the semicolons into place,” she said. She did not speak for 30 years to Vito J. Lopez, a Brooklyn assemblyman who, she said, had serial feuds with assemblywomen that went unnoticed by the male leadership. Mr. Lopez lost his seat after charges of sexual misconduct became public.

She fought, successfully, for discounts on transit fares, and for a law that would protect workers in garment factories from losing their wages if the shop closed up after filling an order.

In 2000, she faced an unusual primary challenge from a lawyer named Patrick O’Malley. He was supported by Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor, as well as former Mayor Edward I. Koch, and even the mayor of Baltimore — Mr. O’Malley’s brother, Martin O’Malley.

Afterward, when Ms. Nolan captured the Democratic nomination 60 percent to 40 percent, she could not resist gloating: “I beat three mayors — Koch, Giuliani and the guy from Baltimore.”

Through her three decades in office, and in the two centuries before, no woman served as any of the tines on the triad of power that rule state government: the governor, Senate majority leader, and Assembly speaker. It is called, accurately, three men in a room.

Last week, she and other ranking Assembly members initially said they wanted to stand by Mr. Silver after his arrest. Perhaps, she acknowledged on Thursday, she stuck with the speaker longer than was helpful for herself, but she had no regrets.

“I hesitated. I didn’t announce until the situation was resolved. I knew Shelly as a person,” she said. “I didn’t want to be in the cast of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”

There is a race now to declare that the race for speaker is all but over: that Mr. Heastie, who would be the first African-American to serve as speaker, has lined up enough votes. But there has yet to be an actual election for speaker.

“I feel very strongly that this is the one time in my career where it’s not over till it’s over,” she said. “I have been told many times the train has left the station, only to hear that somehow the vote didn’t go the way the seers said.”

She came into office as a wide-eyed young person, unworried about things she did not yet know about. She remains liberated from careerist anxiety.

“I was 25, what did I have to lose?” Ms. Nolan said. “Now I’m 56. And I’ve got nothing to lose.”